It might have been the day the Chrome OS is finally announced, but according to Robert Scoble, this was actually a timely stunt by Google in an attempt to steal some of the spotlight before what he claims to be a “big announcement” coming from Microsoft on Monday. Apparently he has seen and shot videos of it, but is not allowed to talk about. Let the speculation begin.

As it turns out, next Monday is not the ordinary first day of the week for Microsoft. On that day, Microsoft is kicking off it’s Worldwide Partner Conference 2009 in New Orleans and from just looking at the keynotes list, is nothing to be sneezed at. Long story short, it’s basically a who’s who list of Microsoft executives. However, this doesn’t actually help narrow down what the big announcement might be since almost every Microsoft division is represented extensively.

Update: Some people have pointed out what Scoble meant is that Microsoft runs fourteen (14) billion-dollar (valued) businesses, which makes more sense grammatically. In which case, puts a dent in my speculation.

Whereas Windows falls under the Client division and Azure falls under the Server and Tools division (they have since merged as the platforms division, but remain separate in financial reports), the Microsoft Business Division among other (and obviously extremely profitable) initiatives is responsible for the Office suite.

The second clue Scoble provides is that it runs in a browser, Chrome and Firefox specifically, and at least witnessed being demoed in Firefox. Whilst it’s not impossible whatever this is is not a Silverlight application, I’m more inclined to guess it’s an AJAX web application.

To play devil’s advocate however, Scoble specifically refers to “part of the Microsoft announcement” runs in a Chrome and Firefox, which could be interpreted one of two ways. Either it is not entirely a web application or that it is not 100% compatible with Chrome and Firefox.

To add a bit of seasoning to the salad mix if you will, Microsoft evangelist Keith Combs had been tweetingthis week of some “secret Microsoft software”. Whilst I’m not sure if the two tweets are related to each other or related to this announcement, it appears at least one of the softwares would allow users to create content, which fits with the Office clue. If he is talking about the same software, why he doubts it might not work on Windows Server 2008 R2 remains a mystery. What Keith was referring to has since been revealled to be Expression Encoder Screen Capture.

Putting together all the clues, I’m going to speculate this is the public release of the Microsoft Office Web application that was announced back at PDC08, possibly with some new major features or capabilities that wasn’t demoed initially to take it above and beyond just Microsoft’s version of Google Docs. If it is indeed Office Web, it will certainly have to compete with the mindblowing collaboration features of Google Wave which sets the bar pretty high.

Nonetheless, there’s always the chance that I’m way off and it could be something complete different, but hey, that’s the price of admission for the speculative rollercoaster. 🙂

Update 2: Some people have provided me with more information that confirms the big announcement on Monday will be indeed Office Web application.

Update 3:Commenter “Bob” points out that the company that previously owned Office.com has recently changed their domain. Microsoft Office Web applications moving in? The plot thickens.

Update 4: It has been confirmed Keith wasn’t referring to the same thing as Scoble. The Office Web application prediction lives on nonetheless.

“Scoble specifically refers to “part of the Microsoft announcement” runs in a Chrome and Firefox, which could either interpreted one of two ways. Either it is not entirely a web application or that it is not 100% compatible with Chrome and Firefox.”

It could also mean that the announcement consists of more than one product, and that one of them is entirely a web application that runs in all browsers, and that the other(s?) is not a web app.

4.-Windows Live Suite Wave 4 get demoed (supposedly comes with at least a new app, the finished movie maker and updated versions of the rest)

Wild guesses:

1.- Social Desktop gets the green light and will be included in windows 7 after all (hey, it uses the live framework, silverlight 3, Windows 7 Explorer and could be using the MS P2P protocol = would be extremely cool)

2.- Live Mesh 1.0 (also live framework related) since it is actually a big deal. it comes with local and cloud apps that can run from the browser to the desktop and viceverza. can run offline, they work in the mac and in windows mobile.

I heard this too many times to beleive what Scobles says… and even if it was MS…

And remember this guy cryed in front of the World Wide Telecope app… sure, this is a great app, but man, listening to him, it was gonna change our life…

For Monday, W7 and near RTM version of Office 2010, as lots of persons guessed long time before Scoble said anything. And of course general orientation of the actual projects.
Of course, getting Mesh out of beta and explaining to the world that it’s much more than a file syncing tool (and annoucing pricing) would be great… If they annouce it, my bet is that it wasn’t planified initially…

While the speculations so far point to an Office Apps suite, Windows Azure Beta or Windows 7 details, I have to say that none of those things come off “some pretty amazing stuff”. Personally, I’ve never been impressed by web apps. Maybe it’s something bigger, that we’ve never seen before.

Its groundbreaking idea from Google web OS and they are planning to wipe out Windows in a most strategic manner. Google clearly pointing to Microsoft when they say “The operating systems that browsers run were designed in an era where there was no web”. But there are few questions which are unanswered like what will happen when we will go offline in Chrome OS? Can we use offline applications like iTunes or Photoshop? Can we run third party applications? How they are going to make profit from it ? I am also bit concerned whether Chrome OS will be embraced by enterprises as it is open source and web based as there is always a security issue….Just wait another thought can Chrome OS will become a global hit especially in small countries where internet is very fickle. But leaving these things aside its going to be win-win situation for the users and it will be interesting to witness the war between giants.

Sounds like Keith is definitely talking about something else. Like Ken Jackson pointed out, he has some sort of client thing (Why else would he bother to see if it runs on R2 and Win7?) and he pointed out that his NDA ends at the end of the week, not on monday when the announcement is supposed to be.

Scoble has one modus operandi: he takes ridiculous products and hypes them to boost his own pageviews, and then the product is released and we’re all completely disappointed. The list is lengthy, and from memory alone, includes 30boxes, Windows Longhorn/Vista, that telescope thing from microsoft, and on and on.

Each time, Scoble claims he has inside knowledge on a truly amazing, revolutionary product. Each time, he posts tantalizing hints about all the great things he’s doing with the product. Each time, the product is announced and I struggle to figure out what the big deal really was.

On the other hand, he has no idea about the really interesting product announcements.

Envisioning an OS for Web Apps
Gazelle represents the first time that a browser has been implemented as a multi-principal operating system. From the amount of interest and speculation the paper has generated, it appears that this is an idea whose time has come. For Wang and her colleagues, there are still many challenges in working through this complex problem, but they are convinced that their work advances the industry toward a new generation of operating system tailored for Web environments.

How about this then:
Office Web Apps + Live Mesh + Sharepoint… Let’s you:
1. Edit “documents” (now suddenly seems like an outdated term) which are stored in the mesh directly in the browser (hence the browser references)
2. The mesh synchronizes documents from your own PC to sharepoint (hence the W7 reference)
3. Install it on your own Corporate Server (hence the R2 reference) – or even Home Server
4. Slap an API on it, let it all be programmable via VS

Now corporate it folks can control what’s in their own private mesh, set up security, etc. Probably something that many mid-sixed and larger corporations would want instead of having their stuff on Microsofts Cloud-based servers. This way, they make a nice meshified connection between the web apps and the pc apps I think.

They might struggle to define how live mesh corporate plays together with live mesh private (as they did with messenger vs. office communicator), but I think they should blend the together in some way and allow me to be connected to several mesh’es at the time… They would probably call it Office Mesh vs. Live Mesh…

No more talk about software and/or +/- services, now it’s all just a bit messh.

Oh how the guessing game is fun…. and pointless… but fun…. (and pointless)…

14 is indeed very interesting number here.. As it was pointed out earlier by others, it’s part of the 14 billion dollar business of MS. Also, Office 14 was the operating code name for the now called Office 2010. And it could also mean, that 14 businesses of MS are somehow going to be tightly integrated with office 2010. we have already started seeing such integrations. I wouldn’t be surprised if MS-Vine is integrated with office server somehow. you never know the real context behind that sentence – but all roads point towards MS touting it’s webOffice.

[UPDATE] The software I was referring to in the captured tweets above is the Expression Encoder Screen Capture software that is part of the Expression Encoder 3 product. More product details later today.

while Office web apps and the office live update is not up for annotated participants or Microsoft testers. it is on tech preview for Microsoft partners and related mvp’s that assisted to the wpc09 on a non disclose status.

2 and 3 were off

But in day two in the #2 prediction we at least had the confirmation that both Windows Azure and Microsoft Online Services will be fully released for PDC09. that and pricing for Azure is not so bad.

Day 1 also saw the confirmation of RTM for july and a close to full disclose on the windows 7 release strategy. even if there was not special windows 7 announcement.

But there are still two days more to go.

I just saw a interview of ina fried with ray ozzie where he says that there is going to be a Live Mesh announcement tomorrow….ummm